Since its inception in 1995, the Java™ programming language has become increasingly popular. (Java™ is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.) Java, which is an interpreted language enabled the creation of applications which could be run on a wide variety of platforms. This ability to function across a variety of different client platforms, i.e., platform independence, and Java's relatively easy implementation of network applications has resulted in its use in endeavors as basic as personal web pages to endeavors as complex as large business-to-business enterprise systems.
As Java has become more commonplace, a wide variety of tools and development platforms have been created to assist developers in the creation and implementation of applications in Java as well as other languages providing platform independence. These development platforms can be built around an application server program that provides a common interface for accessing internal data and resources. These development platforms have also included commonly-used modules and components that can be included in newly-created applications, thus sparing the developers the burden of creating these components and having to recreate the efforts of others.
While these platforms enable users to utilize previously developed modules and components, there are some inefficiencies with the current mechanisms by which these modules are included in new applications. Current implementations of web application environments require that all of the resources provided by a web-application be stored within the web application. This implementation requires that whenever resources stored in a web application are updated, all web applications providing those resources must be similarly updated. What is needed is an improved method for organizing and structuring web applications.